


Remembering The Fundamentals

by Phrenotobe, VelourFanClub (toomanysorrows)



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/F, First Crush, First Kiss, Fluff, fellas is it gay to hold your best friend while she casts spells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22139734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phrenotobe/pseuds/Phrenotobe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomanysorrows/pseuds/VelourFanClub
Summary: The morning frost comes with a stiff breeze. Dorothea has a stole for the cold, but it’s coming undone as she sets up to cast.Even now, they can’t relax. She’s been handed something new recently - a dusty old tome that prickles under her fingertips when she touches the cover. Nothing to do with a Crest, but just as unexplainable. She’s read it end to end, working out something new.
Relationships: Dorothea Arnault/Petra Macneary
Comments: 7
Kudos: 81
Collections: Nagamas Gifts





	Remembering The Fundamentals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Garchomp445](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garchomp445/gifts).



The morning frost comes with a stiff breeze. Dorothea has a stole for the cold, but it’s coming undone as she sets up to cast.  
Even now, they can’t relax. She’s been handed something new recently - a dusty old tome that prickles under her fingertips when she touches the cover. Nothing to do with a Crest, but just as unexplainable. She’s read it end to end, working out something new. 

Hands spread, she focuses on the training dummy at the other end of the yard, lifting her hands and separating them to shape magic as the book had described, diagrams of the shape of every fingertip. 

The dummy explodes from inside, a rain of straw and splinters and ragged bits of sackcloth. Even from here, the dusty scent of obliterated hay catches inside Dorothea’s nose. Her mouth tastes copper as she reels from the noise. 

Dorothea goes back to the book, checking the diagrams one last time.  
She’s always had nice hands, and she’s treated them well. There’s a fresh scratch on her knuckles that she doesn’t remember getting. She looks up slowly from her place in her book, drawing herself up a little taller when she sees Petra through the window. 

It isn’t love, she thinks. It’s easy for her to like people, and easier still to draw her defences up. Petra is charming, that is all. 

She opens her hand and flexes it, ready to try again. An inhale, exhale, a shape in the air. The training dummy pulls out of the sand with a crunch, and the crude approximations of limbs covered with too-small armour from five years ago begin to pop off one by one. Like her own arm is fixed in place while it happens, she can’t stop it, even with the shape of a counterspell. The head of the dummy draws upward, snapping the neck as the helmet crumples inward. It all drops to the ground. It hits hard and heavy on the sand, like gravity remembered and was taking double dues. Dorothea gags at the thought of what that could have been for anything made of living flesh and bone. Copper, hanging on her tongue. But she’s got a responsibility to stay. Putting her hand to her forehead, she allows a moment of weakness before pulling herself back together.

“Good Mornings!” Petra chirps, buffing her blade with her sleeve as she enters the arena. “Caspar has ruined two already today?”  
“No,” Dorothea says, “I’m sorry, that was me.”  
“Then it was a rage of success?”  
“Not... No, Petra, it wasn’t,” Dorothea says. She swallows down her stress and gives Petra a smile. She pins it up carefully, but Petra leans in, her eyebrows and mouth pulled down in a concerned frown.  
“Dorothea...” she says.  
“I’m fine, I promise,” Dorothea says, with a nervous little laugh.  
“Your furs are coming undone,” Petra says.  
Without a further thought she brings her hands back to her own clothes, unpinning a broach and leaning forward.  
“I want you to be holding still,” she says, the pin sinking into Dorothea’s fur stole, “The needle is long and good for stabbing. My grandfather gifted me to it.”  
Dorothea waits, close enough that the satisfied chuff of Petra’s breath ghosts her bare neck.  
“This will not be moving now,” Petra says with pride. She straightens up and meets Dorothea’s eye.  
“Thank you. I assume you’ll want it back?”  
Petra shakes her head, raising a hand to wave off the idea.  
“Anybody else yes, but you can keep it. I think it looks good with you.” 

Petra looks away, to fish out a sharpening stone and tune up the edge of her weapon. Dorothea picks up her book again, ignoring the tingle in her fingertips as she brings it up to her chest.  
“I’m trying to make this spell work, but it won’t-”  
“I can stay?” Petra says. She gestures with her blade, showing her intentions.  
“Oh, of course. It won’t be very interesting. I should be done soon, if you want to come back later.”  
“You are nice to look at, I see no reasons to leave soon.”  
“You want to watch me?”  
“Yes.” 

Dorothea gives her a puzzled tip of the head, but checks the tome again. Any more time holding it, and her fingers will go numb. She dumps it unceremoniously back on the table and focuses on the training dummy at the end of the arena. 

The cast is wrong again, but she knew it as soon as she started. She shapes into a counterspell as soon as she can, feeling the hot, vibrating wave of power course across the arena and spiral off upwards toward the roof. Slate tiles skid off and shatter on the ground as the energy finally hits the limit, exhausting itself in a rumbling boom of thunder. 

Dorothea dusts her hands off, irritatedly gathering her skirts to move swiftly out of the way of Petra’s practise.  
“Go ahead, Petra. The place is yours,” she calls grandly. She shuffles off, irritated when Petra blocks the door.  
“Something is troubling your mind,” she says, “Let me help.”  
Dorothea shakes her head.  
“It’s a very strong spell. I just need time to study the forms, that’s all.”  
“I can be doing it with you!” Petra protests, “I can be your study. If I am doing it wrong, you will know not to do it with yourself.” 

Petra’s insistence makes Dorothea laugh. She turns aside, opening the pages at the diagrams. Petra brings her hand up to her chin as she studies them, faithful in her concentration.  
“Can you tell me what it should be doing?” Petra asks.  
“When I use it, it should make things ... dissolve.”

Petra nods, putting her hand up on Dorothea’s shoulder.  
“Show me the way. I will watch.” 

Dorothea nods, forcing away the tremble as she shapes the gesture. A chunk of masonry rattles out of the wall, dropping to the ground and shattering like glass. Petra is by her side, watching wordlessly.  
“It is explaining the two training dummies,” she says mildly.  
Dorothea laughs with a cough, sudden and sharp like a punch in the throat.  
“I’m hopeless,” she says, “I can’t do it.”  
“I will help,” Petra says simply. 

She shifts silently on her feet like a hunter, a movement that Dorothea wouldn’t believe could happen so swiftly if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes. Petra behind her, tucking Dorothea’s long hair back behind her shoulder, taking her hands and holding them in warm fingers, wrists tickled by fur trim. 

“I cannot do the magic as you can, Dorothea,” Petra says, her voice and breath low by Dorothea’s ear, the nape of her neck, “But I pay my attention to you.”  
“Oh,” Dorothea says. 

Dorothea raises her arms again, guided slowly by Petra’s hands.  
“In Brigid, it is important to be knowing how to breathe,” Petra says, “I see when you panic.”  
“Petra,” Dorothea murmurs.  
“We will be breathing together. Yes?”  
“Y-Yes.”  
Petra breathes in loudly, exhaling slowly. The warmth tickles Dorothea’s neck.  
“You are having the tension,” she croons, “Lean back at me. I will not let you fall.” 

Dorothea doesn’t find it easy to trust, but she’s known Petra long enough to try. She allows herself to be held, finds comfort by Petra’s head angled in sympathy next to her own. 

“As I was studying, I thought about what it meant,” Petra says, “You are missing pieces from inside the text. When you draw a bow powerfully, you must be taking care not to snap the string.”  
“But I read everything-”  
“Diagrams do not show everything,” Petra says, “Experience teaches best.”  
Lightly she raises their linked arms and sweeps gentle curves through the air, hand in hand with Dorothea’s palms resting in hers. 

“You have this strength, Dorothea,” Petra says, “It is waiting for you. You are not new in magic, you have the fundamental things.”  
She laughs like a song, squeezing Dorothea’s knuckles. The scratch stings, but Dorothea likes the reassurance. 

“When you cast, how do you stand?” Petra asks.  
Dorothea straightens unwillingly, balanced on her feet.  
“When you cast, how do you breathe?”  
Dorothea draws in a breath all the way through, like she’s preparing to sing.  
Petra’s hands slip out of Dorothea’s, bracing at her waist to offer her support without interfering. Dorothea doesn’t quiver; she’s trained her poise. 

“When you make magic...”  
“I don’t skip my preparation,” Dorothea says, finishing Petra’s sentence.

She coaxes magic up into her fingers until it feels thick enough to touch, focusing her attention on the remaining training dummy. Her palms come together before she draws them wide, throwing a shape with a gesture. 

In moments less than seconds, the dummy vanishes, and a fine-grain haze of atomized particles tricks down into the divot in the arena sand. 

Petra lifts Dorothea up while she peeps with joy, the movement easy and natural as she brings her down again and spins her around. Dorothea allows herself to grasp Petra around the neck, pulling her in tight for a hug.  
“I did it,” she says, “I did it!”  
Petra’s gentle hands shift to hold her tight. A perfect moment, broken as the heavens above the arena open with the first spots of a storm. 

“You are beautiful, Dorothea,” Petra breathes like a prayer.

Dorothea has been called beautiful many times before, but she tips her head, meeting the warmth of Petra’s soft mouth. Petra’s new to kissing where Dorothea isn’t, forgetting to breathe until they break apart, but she leans back in afterward, lingering close like she’s waiting for permission.  
“I meant it,” Petra says.  
“I know,” Dorothea says, “I’d like it if you did it again.”


End file.
